2013/02/01 by Jo Appleby
Arts and Humanities · Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Archaeology and ancient environmental studies #Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies #Paleopathology and ancient diseases
paper · doi:10.1017/s0959774313000061
openalex publication_date 2013/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Time and temporality have been at the centre of a number of accounts of burial practices in the Bronze Age of Britain in the last twenty years. Up to now, however, the temporality of practice has been taken as an indication of past understandings of time and/or the ancestors. In this article I wish to argue that the temporality of mortuary practices was not merely reflective of understandings of time, but in fact was constitutive of them, and that through the changing temporality of mortuary practices, people's engagement with monuments themselves was changed. These changing temporalities were driven by the transition from inhumation to cremation as the dominant mode of disposal of the dead. By invoking chaînes opératoires for each mode, I will demonstrate the underlying similarities and differences of the two rites, showing how cremation led to a fundamental change in the temporality of mortuary behaviour, and as such created new understandings of funerary monuments and place .